Have you recently read an upvoted Reddit comment that was bigoted, creepy, misogynistic, transphobic, racist, homophobic, or just reeking of unexamined, toxic privilege? Of course you have! Post it here.

okay, reddit. listen the fuck up. i study slavery for a living. here are some facts:

in 1860, 4 million people were enslaved, approximately 11-13% of the total U.S. population (depending on what records you look at). I'm not saying "Black people," I'm saying people who were enslaved. that was just over 150 years ago. if you are a Black person in the United States in their 20s, it is possible that your great-grandparents were enslaved. if you are a Black person in the United States in their 50s, it is possible that your grandparents were enslaved. remember all those whimsical or heartfelt stories your grandparents told you when you were a kid? imagine if those were about being enslaved.

the South in the 19th century was built upon slavery; literally, the politics, economics, society, intellectualism, everything. the South was dominated by slavery as an institution. it was only abolished formally in 1865 throughout the South. that was LESS than 150 years ago. (see above, about generations. and stuff.)

slavery itself was built upon racism. note: there are no white slaves in the 19th c. South. redditors and racists can whine all they want about ill-treatment of the Irish, and white indentured servitude, but those groups were not targeted exclusively because of their race. there's the difference: yes, the Irish suffered. yes, white indentured servitude wasn't pleasant. but these groups were ultimately allowed into society (even in modified, lower-class terms) because of a generalized white supremacy. it was bad for the Irish, to be sure; but at least they were considered white. (at least, they were considered white by the mid-19th c. there was a while there where they weren't, but they were still accorded more rights than Blacks.)

slavery was built fundamentally upon violence. literally, violence against Black people was the entire determining principle for slavery-- white people feared slave rebellion more than ANYTHING, and used violence to quell it.

the North was really fucking racist, too. despite not having slavery by the 19th c., they instituted segregation prior to the South. pretty much the entirety of American society was pretty fucking racist.

in the 1890s, approx. 744 Black people were lynched. SEVEN HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR people were violently murdered OUTSIDE OF THE LAW and got away with it, in front of massive audiences who CHEERED. and it's not like it stopped then. here's an iconic photo from the 1930s. look at the audience. some of them look delighted. also, note: my grandparents were born in the '20s. yours might have been, too. this is not so far away in time.

Black people couldn't vote in the South until the late 1960s. remember that generational discussion up there? yeah. your PARENTS were alive in the late 1960s. hell, you might have been alive in the 1960s, depending on your age! (i generally work under the assumption that most redditors are young, but that may not be true!)

literally what is OP even talking about

ANYWAY the point is that a) literally slavery was fucking awful, traumatic, institutionalized violence that permeated society and inculcated racism throughout the US, so b) it doesn't matter if you never enslaved anyone, the legacy of racism wrought from slavery is still very much alive, and no one is exempt from it, especially because c) seriously slavery was not that long ago.

tl;dr: seriously reddit just shut the fuck up you have no idea how ignorant you are

If I could upvote this a million times, I would. I don't understand why people think that slavery and racism don't affect modern day times. My grandmother is from the South, so it very probable that my great-grandparents (and definitely my great-great-grandparents) were slaves. My parents were born in the late 50s/early 60s, so they and my grandparents lived before and during the Civil Rights Movement.